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Thursday, November 3, 2016

Wall Street Journal: Educators are key voters in battleground states - Lily's Blackboard

Wall Street Journal: Educators are key voters in battleground states - Lily's Blackboard:

Wall Street Journal: Educators are key voters in battleground states

The Wall Street Journal profiled Lily and her efforts to motivate NEA members to vote.
“Her union can also deliver key voters. Among NEA’s three million members, roughly three-quarters are women, many of them with college degrees, who live in the swing suburban areas in presidential battleground states.”
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What do teachers do when they retire? This!

 Bob Peterson, a retired teacher and past president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, is a busy guy. Outspoken social justice advocate, unionist to the core…and citizen of the world.

 
Bob and his wife, Barbara, decided that they didn’t need to be 18 to take a “gap year.” Earlier this year, they trekked to four continents, visiting public schools, educators and students everywhere they went. Their travels helped them “learn about efforts to defend the public sector, especially public schools, and how issues of race, class and gender play out in struggles against inequality.”
 
Bob shared their adventure in NEA Today Retired.
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“There was no ‘St. Paul on the Road to Damascus’ moment that instantly changed my life,” Bob wrote. “Instead, there were endless encounters that have irrevocably shaped my view of the world and my role in it.”
“For three decades, the month of March would find me encouraging 30 fifth graders to finish their projects and hold it together until spring break.
This spring, I was doing something entirely different as I tried to keep pace with a young South African who gave a multi-generational group of 15 bicyclists a street-eye history lesson on Soweto’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle.”